About

The name is meant to understate it. The reports are written the way the old annuals were, and underneath each one sits the kind of analysis that used to be the property of a front office: expected goals, shot locations, five-on-five on-ice results, league percentiles, a matchup model that widens rather than sharpens for the playoffs, and a workflow for making a call on a game. An armchair is a perfectly good place from which to know what you are talking about.

This site follows the format of the old pro hockey handbooks: a bio block, the numbers, and then a plain-spoken account of how a player actually plays — the finesse game, the physical game, the mental game, and the intangibles.

A new edition every season. Nothing is overwritten: each season's read stays up, so you can see what was said about a player three years ago and judge how it aged.

How the reports are written

The numbers are pulled from public league data. Everything underneath them is an opinion — formed from watching the player and from how he was actually deployed, and revised as he changes.

Report length follows how much is genuinely known. A first-line centre gets the full treatment; a fourth-liner with forty games gets a short, honest paragraph about his role rather than invented detail padded out to match. Where the evidence is thin, the report says so.

Sources and rights

Statistics and biographical details are facts taken from the National Hockey League's public data feeds. Deployment — who played with whom — is derived from published shift charts by measuring shared ice time.

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under licences that permit reuse with credit; each one is credited on the player’s page, and all of them are listed on the photo credits page. Where no freely-licensed photograph exists, a player is shown by his sweater number.

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the National Hockey League or any of its clubs. Team and league names are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify the clubs a player plays for. No league photography, logos or other league artwork is reproduced.

All written evaluation, and the design of this site, are original work and belong to its author.

If you own material you believe has been used improperly here, get in touch and it will be removed.